If you’re designed out for the day and need something sufficiently geeky to bring you back to midfield, I suggest Andy Skelton’s excellent writeup about a lesser-known but oft-used WordPress string formatting function, WordPress code surprise: wp_sprintf.

For those that fancy doing web design and debugging on Webkit browsers, here is a recently announced round of improvements.

I personally shall appreciate the fact that color values are rendered as originally written —if desired—, which should make experimenting and copying from the browser to the original stylesheet much easier, by preserving the chosen code style. The style presentation and persisting changes add-ons are equally neat.

Maven Pro is a relatively new sans-serif font designed by Joe Prince and offered for free to use. The typeface includes support for basic Latin and western European diacritics, with new weights in development.

Built-in drop down menu support is something we’re working on right now for Thematic 0.9 (one of the many changes you’ll likely be hearing about pretty soon). In the meantime, the always resourceful Cozmoslabs has released a nifty little Child Theme for Thematic called PageDrop that adds drop down menus to the current Thematic style. I’m sure this will be very popular. Check it out.

The LaunchPad theme has been updated to work with the new Google FeedBurner. Special thanks to go to Michael Moshiri for sending me the updated code. Please make sure you get the theme from the LaunchPad download post and not the WordPress themes directory. I can’t update LaunchPad at the WordPress themes directory without trying to fake out the automated themes checker.

bendler.tv has written an easy to follow tutorial on how to change the Postheader in Thematic. The Postheader is the content, typically including the title and author info, above each post and page. This is can be one of the most powerful tools in your Thematic toolbox and the same technique can be used to modify the Postfooter. It let’s you take extreme control over what appears above and below all of the content on your Thematic site—without touching a single Template file.

Check out the WordPress codex page for Theme Frameworks that “ease theme development by reducing the volume of work which may be needed in creating a backbone for your theme”. Thematic is mentioned along with The Sandbox and others.